eGovPoliNet & Crossover Roadmapping Workshop

When Sep 06, 2012
from 09:00 AM to 03:00 PM
Where Kristiansand
Contact Name
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Motivation and Background

With the Europe 2020 strategy, the European Union has clear strategic policy objectives for 2020: "In a changing world, we want the EU to become a smart, sustainable and inclusive economy. These three mutually reinforcing priorities should help the EU and the Member States deliver high levels of employment, productivity and social cohesion. Concretely, the Union has set five ambitious objectives - on employment, innovation, education, social inclusion and climate/energy - to be reached by 2020. Each Member State has adopted its own national targets in each of these areas. Concrete actions at EU and national levels underpin the strategy". To implement these policy objectives, a set of flagship initiatives has been established to help Europe "emerge from the crisis stronger" (Digital Agenda Europe, Innovation Union, Youth on the move, Resource Efficient Europe, Industrial policy for the globalisation era, Agenda for new skills and jobs, and European platform against poverty).
Due to the Euro zone crisis, a fourth priority has since been added: “to ensure that the Europe 2020 strategy delivers, a strong and effective system of economic governance has been set up to coordinate policy actions between the EU and national levels”, covering: a reinforced economic agenda with closer EU surveillance; action to safeguard the stability of the euro area; and action to repair the financial sector.
With Horizon 2020 , the EU has settled a new programme from 2014 to 2020 for research and innovation to create new growth and jobs in Europe. It will combine all research and innovation funding currently provided through the Framework Programmes for Research and Technical Development, the innovation related activities of the Competitiveness and Innovation Framework Programme (CIP) and the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT). Horizon 2020 will tackle societal challenges by helping to bridge the gap between research and the market by, for example, helping innovative enterprise to develop their technological breakthroughs into viable products with real commercial potential. This market-driven approach will include creating partnerships with the private sector and Member States to bring together the resources needed. Horizon 2020’s proposals for research and innovation focus on three distinct, yet mutually reinforcing, priorities: societal challenges, excellent science and industrial leadership. A challenge-based approach will bring together resources and knowledge across different fields, technologies and disciplines, including social sciences and the humanities. This will cover activities from research to market with a new focus on innovation-related activities, such as piloting, demonstration, test-beds, and support for public procurement and market uptake.  A sketch of the strategic priorities and their relation to e-government related development and research innovation is provided in Figure 1.

Horizon 2020

Figure 1: European policy and research priorities as a context for future e-government research

Besides these European policy and research priorities and the 2015 eGovernment Action Plan of the European Commission, a number of trends and innovation visions for e-government can be discerned up to 2020, such as :

  1. Dissolving silos and dissolving borders
  2. Collaboration with other actors such as companies, non-profit organisations, communities, citizens and hackers
  3. Governments are becoming ‘smart’ using ‘big’ data and data analytics
  4. The strengthening of social media and mobile
  5. Local is smart
  6. Blurring actor roles and relationships
  7. New roles for government

A particular strand of developments to advance e-government research is currently funded within the research priority theme “ICT solutions for governance and policy modelling” in the EC’s Seventh Framework Programme. Fifteen projects plus three coordination and support activities have been funded since 2010.  The objectives of call 4 in 2009 and of call 7 in 2011 were as follows :

  • Development of (new) governance models to empower stakeholder groups and enable mass collaboration over online platforms to collaboratively solve complex societal problems, including respective tools to support stakeholder empowerment and mass collaboration within new governance models. Such tools should in particular support data and knowledge creation/sharing/learning/tracking, in establishing transparency and tracking of inputs to policy models, as well as support security, identity, access to ensure privacy, and the delineation of constituency domains.
  • Development of concepts and solutions to support policy modelling through mining, mapping, simulation, aggregation and visualization of opinions, through simulation/modelling of [new] policy options at micro and macro-level, through tools and models that support public services as complex systems, through tools for exploiting public sector data and knowledge, and through concepts and the means for modelling complex systems. Instruments and tools that combine opinion mining and exploitation of public sector data and knowledge thereby using solutions of complex systems modelling and advanced simulation and visualization techniques / tools to identify emerging societal trends were particularly requested in call 7.

In a study by the support action eGovPoliNet and supported by the European Commission, the fifteen projects have been investigated in terms of how well the key objectives are covered overall, and what research needs for the horizon 2020 could be identified in the area of e-government and policy development. The study and its findings will be published shortly and will be presented at the workshop.

The projects: eGovPoliNet and Crossover

The two support actions eGovPoliNet and Crossover work together to support the establishment of an international community on ICT for governance and policy modelling. The key objectives of the projects are:

  • Provide a worldwide complete, dynamic, up-to-date picture of the State of the Art tools and methodologies for next-generation policy-making
  • Disseminate research and practice amongst public governance and policy modelling stakeholders, and raise awareness of policy makers about the concrete opportunities offered by research results and particular tools for governance and policy development, and evangelize practitioners who do not use them
  • Facilitate knowledge exchange and cross-fertilisation between practitioners and researchers, between different policy sectors, between different disciplines, across countries and build a strong global multi-disciplinary digital participation, governance and policy modelling research and practice community around those tools
  • Achieve a lasting integration of currently fragmented research in digital public participation, governance and policy modelling
  • Clarify demand-driven research needs and policy recommendations (including an international research roadmap) and stimulate joint research and practice in agreed research areas
  • Provide a barometer of research and practice effectiveness for public governance and policy modelling in Europe and worldwide by establishing a corpus of knowledge and lessons-learnt resources to evidence what kind of projects have delivered what kind of results and have thereby been considered effective for digital public governance and policy modelling

Objectives of the workshop

The workshop is part of the projects’ activities to establish a strong community on ICT for governance and policy modelling and to stimulate discussion on future grand challenges and research needs. With the particular objectives of the projects to cross-fertilize among key actors of distinct disciplines and policy practitioners, the workshop will

Ina  subsequent breakout session, the participants will discuss future research needs in light of the strategic objectives towards Europe 2020 and Horizon 2020, and will develop a research roadmap.
In a final feedback  session, participants will discuss and reflect the demands and added value of the research roadmap developed.

The workshop is scheduled till approximately 15:00 CET.

Connect to the community on "ICT for governance and policy modeling"

LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=4165795

Web and knowledge portal: www.policy-community.eu

More information about this event…